As someone who has worked a bullshit cyber security job in government, I will say 50% is a conservative estimate. Our team had 9 people in it: 1 manager, 6 junior-mid level engineers and 2 senior engineers. The only ones that did any actual work were the senior engineers. The junior-mid engineers literally did nothing for months on end. The manager would disappear all week only to turn up on Friday mornings to give "corporate update" presentations to the team.
You’re claiming that 80% of your time, 80% of your substantial pay, was spent managing the fallout of a single employee on a team of 30. It’s astonishingly inefficient and wasteful.
And while you’re emblematic of this behavior, it’s widespread in the tech industry. The vast majority of management is terrified of any sort of real conflict or intervention, so they become ineffectual and useless.
I was once put in exactly this position. Our IT Manager was fired and I was put in charge of about a dozen sysadmin and helpdesk people. They had over 130 open tickets and claimed to be too busy to do anything. Bear in mind I knew little about infrastructure (I was an applications dev and tech lead who had become a 3rd line application support leader).
I spent a month doing triage, and sorting out their process (they were doing triage, but gave it to a relatively weak member of staff who couldn't spot patterns or kill off tickets effectively). The number came down to 30, and the team was far more focussed. I also got to see who was helping and who wasn't, and sacked another member of staff who bullied less knowledgeable members of the team (while doing literally nothing but spreading FUD).
The point (obvious to anyone who's read The Goal, which I hadat that point) is that the graph doesn't tell you jack about what's going on. You have to go and look. The incoming tickets pipe was the first place to go because it's the simplest firehose to plug. That gave people space to get off the ticket treadmill and work on longer term tech debt.
I'm a current employee, this is still accurate; teams get absolutely no work done in the final 2 weeks of the year outside of extremely critical fixes.
One of my jobs is public sector. Our project has maybe half the roles filled. A project that was supposed to take 6 months didn't even have a line of code written in those first months for want of some technical roles to be filled. And those more senior roles are still to be filled. But we are charging ahead anyway to give the idea of progress.
People complain about terrible bosses and think that it is a symptom of "out of touch elites." But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.
I think 64% is a low number and a lot of people imagine that vague assurances are actually recognition.
I further think that this leads to the company not receiving feedback from it's staff except for the ultimate: quitting. So you have staff who don't want to talk about how you could make things better, who don't want to innovate, who don't rock the boat, and who then leave because you don't seem open to communication.
And in the worst example, the company then explains away their absence via a "Well, THEY didn't have the right Culture, did they?"
Worked for a corporate and it was amazing to witness folks doing "BS" jobs and getting away with it and people contributing nothing measurable to project outcomes except attending meetings and the release party.
I work for much smaller company now - sure there is more pressure, a level of disorganization but everybody contributes.
I don’t really agree with “a large percentage”, but yeah it happens, and identifying these people is part of being a manager, right? Everyone on the team needs to pull together, and we need to ask non performers to leave.
I don’t think there’s any real evidence that “command and control” is actually safer - the world is full of failed software projects - but I agree that it’s perceived to be safer, and the rest follows on from there I guess.
Anxiety and a lot of gossip can make people do dumb things, like make non-technical middle managers issue stupid edicts because they don’t know about git logs.
I’ve worked for orgs where engineer head count alone pushed 250 people. The number of people in power with no technical skills managing technical workers was a huge waste of time.
And if the 10-15% range was true, that’s a major management screwup. A couple of bad hires, sure, it happens but when you’re talking hundreds of people there’s something systemic at fault, which is solely in the realm of management’s responsibility to hire and monitor.
Based on the excuse he gave to Forbes I’d bet you’re right. I’d especially believe some kind of internal inefficiency – e.g. having everyone need to have sign-offs by someone in an understaffed role – or simply having inefficient internal processes meaning that what he thinks is a 2 hour task actually taking much longer.
Another possibility would be something like having over-hired either due to misjudgment or to look like a bigger business to investors and then blaming the workers for not having enough work to do. I remember seeing that from the dotcom era, along with people who were very proud of 7 figure Oracle clusters handling hundreds of transactions per day. Senior management was so focused on IPO riches that they allowed if not actually encouraged it.
Oh there is plenty of bad IT. But I'd wager at least 2/3 is just overworked and understaffed so the "less important" stuff get sidelined and IT dept just becomes a hole no request comes back from unless your boss yells enough...
The OP does have details to back it up, just not hard numbers. He states how new employees had problems getting setup, old employees dealing with misc problems, things not running smoothly in general. Yes most companies consist of more than IT but these days the problem is many organizations seem to look at IT as an extra expense they can skimp on or even completely do without("The bosses son is really good with computer's he can fix any problems that arise!"). Theres two sides to every story and maybe this department was bloated and could've used some restructuring we don't know that part for sure but we do know that things went from everyone being able to work efficiently to all sorts of random issues, suffered by general employees not IT that should've been avoided.
You're taking this awfully personally, I'll ask again do you do in some sort of managerial position? Do you have some personal experience with this sort of thing?
Early in my career, I was in a big organization, surrounded by people like this. Our direct manager was not competent to assess their work output on any technical level. He might not have cared anyway, since the true measure of management is how large your pool of subordinates is.
It was truly soul-sucking to be surrounded by such mediocrity. I'm all for work-life balance, but having counterparts who accomplish so little is demoralizing.
I can almost convince myself that there's a strategy in it -- with 15 people doing the work of 3 people, a very large bus accident will probably have very little impact on business operations.
It killed me though. I left and went into consulting for a few years. Then startups, where 3 people are expected to do the work of 15. Which can be its own problem, of course!
The aforementioned co-workers? Still at the same place, and honestly they're probably pretty safe (financial industry, revenue is barely affected by macro economy). Goodness help them if they ever need a new job.
I see the same problem. Reviewing some internal metrics, at least half the team members were basically producing nothing. No artifacts of any kind over months on end.
Overall productivity was the same. The remaining folks were producing significantly more and burning out. They actually lost work life balance, working way beyond 9-5 hours.
In this case, I don’t think my company has figured out how to manage remote workers. Even the direct managers appear checked out, delegating their own responsibilities to this group of ICs who are burned out.
Last time I worked at a big company, there was lots of dead wood, but one guy in particular was just a massive liability. Nice guy, tried hard, but utterly incompetent, and (I think there is a term for this?) he was unaware / ignorant of how incompetent he was. He would often check in code that would break the build (team of 300 engineers, large telecom system), he would write and run scripts that would bring computing clusters to their knees (this was late 90s, there are probably ways to mitigate that now), he would consume lots of high-quality talent's time with basic questions, etc.
I literally asked my manager if we could pay Leo to sit home and play video games. OF course, as you said, everyone's gotta look busy.
Here's the punchline: I learned a new term (to me, at the time... not sure I've heard it again) from a greybeard/wizard there -- this guy was a genius. He had a very appropriate term for Leo: negative producer.
Or you're just not as experienced as you seem to think you are.
> half the company had prod access to user accounts
That's pretty normal depending on the size of the company.
The chances of that being true is pretty high if it's a smallish upstart with <50 employees.
> I've never met any of these stereotypes in the real world, although people do disagree on what is enough.
I've encountered several - they were all in the same company. It got so bad that multiple people quit and others were going to, until the people in question where "promoted" to a position where they weren't in the decision loop anymore.
I'm currently working for an operationally shit organisation (and it's not a small place all in all). The team I'm in get nothing written down, it's all verbal, when misunderstandings happen (which is often) days or weeks can be lost, we don't have the tools we need, we don't get any training which we are supposed to pick up magically people are working excessive hours without overtime pay, resignations are happening and mine will follow.
If enough people resign the workload on the boss (who is the proximal cause of this, although clearly the rot goes much higher up) will probably cause him to resign. And then the organisation will have an IT system that nobody knows how to use and it will be catastrophic.
This situation is horrible for us. People are crying out for documentation and process. I'll spend some time reading this article more carefully, try to work out whether sweet spot is.
Yes, yes, yes! Instead of always blaming the worker, look at the environment. I have been on 50x teams and the main reason was that we were allowed to do our job coding and making recommendations and management did their job by removing obstacles and clarifying things quickly. They also believed us when we said something. I see it so often that management has an inherent distrust of their own people and goes behind their backs to get advice from other parties.
You go down to 0.1x if management doesn't make decisions, drags you through tons of process like status meetings and stupid metrics, forces you to use incompetent vendors and so on.
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